As students become
better readers, it is important for them to understand and gain meaning
from what they are reading.Summarizing allows students to pick out important information
from a story, and leave the unimportant parts behind. When students
summarize, they identify and recall main ideas and events that happened
in the story. This lesson will show students how to pick out the
important information and from texts and summarize it into their own
words.

Materials

-A copy of "Is Pluto No
Longer a Planet?" article (1 per student)

-A transparency of the
article "Is Pluto No Longer a Planet?" (or a document camera)

- Summarization rules:
pick out a topic sentence, pick out important facts from the passage,
remove information that is not very useful or that does not back up the
topic sentences, pick out repeated ideas and delete them. (Show this on
a document camera, smart board, or on a transparency.)

-Highlighter (1 per
student)

-Pencils (1 per student)

Procedure

1. "Hello class! Today
we are going to learn about an important tool that makes us better
readers. It is called summarization. Can anyone tell me what this
means? That's correct! Summarization is summing up all of the important
information from the things we read so we can understand it and
deleting everything else that is not needed. Today we are going to read
an article and summarize it!"

2. "First we need to
talk about the summarization rules. [Show rules via document camera,
smart board, or on a transparency.] We begin by picking out the topic
sentence, or what the story is about, and then we take out the
information that is not useful or not important. If there is anything
that is repeated we need to take that information out also."

3. "Now we are going to
read an article about Pluto and summarize it." [Pass out the articles.]
"Now begin reading the article silently to yourself."

[Display the copy of the
article and pass out highlighters] "Now that we have read the passage,
let's look at it and decide what is important. What is the topic
sentence? Good! Everyone highlight the topic sentence on your article.
What is important in the first paragraph? Great! Highlight those
sentences also. Now what information is not important in the article?
Cross those sentences out with your pencil." [Continue through the rest
of the article]

4. Now everyone take out
a sheet of paper and write a summarization about the article. It needs
to be about four sentences long."

Assessment

The students will find
their own article on the National Geographic for kids website, and they
will highlight the important sentences and write one paragraph summary
about their article. The students will turn this in for the teacher to
look at and grade.